@eewiz
I think it might.
I reckon it would depend on how effectively ARM could seperate the engineering arguments from the economic ones.
IF the engineering arguments are provably valid AND there is little or no discounting for companies taking both Cortex and Mali AND ARM only achieves moderate success against imgtec....then ARM will avoid problems.
If the engineering benefits appear slight, the discounting on royalty rates is heavy and ARM starts to take major market share ... well, if I was imgtec's lawyers I would be looking at anti-competitive behavior law around the world.
But that would appear to be a ways off yet.

@coolio
I don't think it is bull.
It makes sense to me that, in an era of GPU-compute, if you design and optimize the CPU and the GPU and all the pathways between them you can produce some advantages over a system with a CPU from one source and a GPU from another.
In time I expect Imagination to be making the same argument for MIPS-PowerVR combinations.
However, I also think that some startups that are working on unified CPU-GPU instruction set architectures might be able to produce something of interest.

'ARM's argument and hope is that, over time, the close compatibility and interworking that can be created between ARM processors and ARM graphics cores will manifest as a performance advantage and bring the market towards it. '
That is complete marketing bull, I'm surprised anyone let's ARM get away with that.

"It could be that Samsung is using a two-supplier, treat-em-mean to keep-em-keen strategy. "
It also could be whatever-apple-do-we-must-also-do strategy. Last week Samsung invested in sharp to get access to IGZO panels, in-spite of having own display development.